"Let us never forget that in that simple act and a lifetime of race and dignity, she showed us every single day what it means to be free. She made us see and agree that everyone should be free. God Bless you Rosa. God Bless."

Storyline

Former US President Bill Clinton, alongside his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, joined other dignitaries and around 2,000 members of the public at the funeral of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

At the Greater Grace Temple Church in Detroit, Michigan, the audience held hands and sang "We Shall Overcome" as family members filed past the casket before it was closed just before noon.

Bishop Charles Ellis III of Greater Grace Temple led the service as 4,000 people packed inside, to say goodbye to the diminutive figure who sparked a civil rights revolution by refusing 50 years ago to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Mourners waited in long lines in the chilly morning to honour Parks. Hours before the funeral began, the line to get one of the 2,000 available public seats at the church extended more than two blocks in Parks' adopted hometown.

"Let us never forget that in that simple act and a lifetime of race and dignity, she (rosa Parks) showed us every single day what it means to be free" said Clinton, who remembered riding segregated buses in his native Arkansas until Parks' stand allowed him and others to break through that barrier of racism.

Clinton once presented Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Parks was 92-years-old when she died on October 24 in Detroit. Nearly 50 years earlier, she was a 42-year-old tailor's assistant at a department store in Montgomery, Alabama, when she was arrested and fined 10 dollars plus four dollars in court costs for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus. Her action on December 1st, 1955, triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior.

The US Supreme Court ruled in December 1956 that segregated seats on city buses were unconstitutional, giving momentum to the battle against laws that separated the races in public accommodations and businesses throughout the southern United States.

But Parks and her husband Raymond were exposed to harassment and death threats in Montgomery, where they also lost their jobs.

They moved to Detroit with Rosa Parks' mother, Leona McCauley, in 1957.